Corporate Design Education

Samsung, Growing Innovation

Design Education at Samsung

by Dan Wickemeyer

In an effort to more effectively leverage it’s design talent, Samsung and Art
Center College of Design established an in-house design academy for product
design, transportation, multimedia, and interdisciplinary design. Dan Wick-
emeyer describes the program as “a globe-trotting design workshop, with in-
ternships and mentor workshops built around a hands-on curriculum, all created
to illuminate the intersections among culture, design, and business strategy.”

“Across the globe, people are hungry for the same thing-freedom,” says Samsung Chairman
Kun Hee Lee. “Freedom from limitations of time and space. Freedom to access information and
entertainment, or to communicate, anytime and anywhere, using products that are simple to
handle, accessible, and innovative. This is true ‘Digital Freedom,’ and it should be available to
everyone, regardless of age, culture, or geography. This is what Samsung understands and
believes, truly, in our “heart.’”

As part of it’s effort to support this mission, Samsung and Art Center established the Innovative
Design Laboratory (IDS), an in-house design academy for product design, transportation,
multimedia, and interdisciplinary design.

When I became Chair of Samsung’s IDS program in 1998 our mandate was to take experienced
designers from Samsung’s various groups and improve their thinking skills and talents. The
need was urgent to give Samsung a coherent global design look across a range of products, and
secure a real identity for the brand. Good design would begin at the heart, so to speak, in the
new ideas and experiences of the participants, and become integral to how Samsung’s products
and processes worked.

Samsung was looking for a leader who could help improve Samsung designers’ creativity and
global awareness, I had previous experience as a design consultant in Japan with Yamaha,
Mitsubishi and Honda, so when Samsung was recruiting for a new leader, it came naturally to
me to meet with the delegation from Korea at Art Center College of Design, and to develop
a new design curriculum for twenty seven of Samsung’s top design employees. Actually, this
might have been Samsung’s second choice—Chairman Lee offered to buy Art Center wholly. He
settled for making a very generous donation and making use of our talents to build a unique
educational program for Samsung’s employees complete with international instructors from
around the globe.

To introduce myself to the company I was flown to Seoul and visited a variety of Samsung sites:
divisions for electronics, aerospace, heavy equipment industries, and semiconductors, as well
as Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology, its factories, and all its design centers. I also
visited many historical sites in order to give me an introduction to Korean philosophies and
its design heritage. Along the way I read Chairman Lee’s book, Samsung’s New Management:
Change Begins with Me, and admired his goals for the company: he aimed to make Samsung’s
products more “human-centered” and achieve better quality, by making Samsung’s designers
more creative and more aware of international issues. It was exciting. I had a blank canvas from
which to work and the support of the company’s biggest design champion.

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 Design Education at Samsung
Both Chairman Lee’s vision and the cultural climate of Korea made it clear to me that a conventional
undergraduate design program would never do the job. Centuries of education by rote learning and
memorization had tied the hands of Korean designers that was thoroughly Confucian—hierarchical, formal,
and strict—but which worked against the creative freedom Samsung needed to compete effectively in the
marketplace. To get Samsung to learn, my first task was to help them “unlearn”—to think outside the
boundaries and let their creative imaginations loose. It was more than an educational process. I joined
Korean culture, immersing myself in Korean ways, to share my own experience and help them grow.

The Course
The course builds upon the students’ disciplinary training by teaching them about the activities comprising
the product development process, including research, product planning, customer needs analysis, concept
development and testing, financial analysis of production, design for manufacturing, intellectual property,
and project management. The curriculum requires reading assignments, lectures, hands-on exercises, class
discussion, case studies, and guest speakers, but the key learning vehicle is the team projects in which
cross-functional groups of four to six students collaborate to develop new products. Each project begins with
a design brief in the form of a market opportunity identified by the class. The teams are each given per diem
to cover out-of-pocket expenses; they then go on to explore the market, benchmark competitive products,
develop concepts, create working models, select one concept to pursue in detail, build a prototype, test the
product with customers, and evaluate the product’s business potential. Completed products are shown in
professional-quality multimedia presentations before a cross-disciplinary panel of experts at the end of each
fourteen week term.

The Global Design Workshops

The Samsung Global Workshops became the school-in-practice for Samsung’s designers. The Chairman
wanted to make Samsung a world leading corporation so we needed their designers to know the world
itself. The workshops conducted three times a year, took 27 designers and four professors to New York, Los
Angeles, Washington D.C. Mexico City, Paris, Florence, Berlin, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Beijing, Xian, Kyoto, and
Tokyo, as well as sites in Korea. It was a comprehensive tour of the history of inspiring, effective design on
the ground in a variety of cultures, focusing on great architecture, design, and art. Lectures were held on the
sidewalks, in restaurants, in the museums and hotel rooms, discussing cultural diversity, great people, great
ideas, inventions, intellectual properties, modern thinking, the Bauhaus, the design spirit, design and nature
and much more. Repeatedly I was asked to define ‘good design’ and my answers were always the same:
Forget about ‘good.’ Good was known and familiar. I wanted them to find their own new definitions about
what was good, not to follow anyone else’s definition. The process was what mattered, not the precedent,
not the outcome. If we built a better process, the outcome would take care of itself.

The eminent designer Massimo Vignelli believed that “teaching the essential principles of design in an
academic setting is almost impossible,” he says. “You have to live and breathe it, not reduce it to abstractions
and rules.” Good design is inherently organic and alive. Design from rote learning and rigidity results in dead
ideas and unsuccessful results. Inspired by such designers as Vignelli and George Nelson, I wrote a short
list of flexible operating principles for Samsung. My goals were:

Give the designers an education of historical, cultural
quality in design, creative thinking and problem solving.
Foster a climate of investigation and intellectual rigor in
which visual creation can flourish.
Improve the designers’ cultural and international
awareness, with an emphasis on social responsibility.
Improve the designers’ communication skills to help
them articulate their ideas through visualization and
verbalization.
Send our graduates into the world with the ability to
make a positive difference in the future direction of
design.

After finishing the IDS program, some of the top designers are selected to travel abroad to spend an
additional four months as an intern within a design consultancy or educational facility. Art Center, Rhode
Island School of Design, Parsons, IDEO, Designworks BMW and Design Continuum have all eagerly accepted
IDS designers. The staff and principals of these firms are their mentors.

Success Update 2003:

As a gauge for determining innovation amoung the worlds leading corporations, Every year the Industrial
Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) are given by the Industrial Designers Society of America and sponsored by
BusinessWeek. This year the 2003 IDEA contest demonstrated that Samsung’s design competence continues
to grow, Samsung won five honors and is now second only to Apple Computer Inc. in total awards for the
past five years. A total of 17 awards since 1998 has made Samsung a global power in product design.

Dan Wickemeyer IDSA

dan@object8.com

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